They advanced, ready to wrap things up in the bloodiest way.
Kasper stepped between me and them like it was nothing.
“Stay down, kid.”
He fired four times. Precise. Clinical. Two bodies hit the floor. The third tried to run—Kasper put one through the back of his knee, then finished him execution-style.
Silence.
Blood on the concrete. My arm was screaming in agony. Kasper dragged me up by the collar like it was nothing.
“You hit?”
“Arm. Through and through.”
Kasper tore his scarf off, wrapped it tight around the wound. “Walk.
We made it three blocks before I nearly passed out. He half-carried me into a safe house, stitched me up himself with fishing line and vodka for antiseptic. Kasper didn’t yell. Didn’t lecture.
All Kasper said, once I could focus again…
“Next time you hesitate, you die. And I won’t be there to bleed for you.”
I never hesitated again.
But that was a long time ago. Now, back in the present, Kasper sets his glass down carefully. He’s older, slower physically, but I know his mind is as sharp as ever.
“You look like shit, Ivan,” Kasper says, his voice droll and dry.
I laugh—short, bitter. “I feel like it.”
He waits.
I drain my vodka. Signal for another.
Then I tell him.
Not everything. Not the ropes. Not the bench. Not the way Landon came apart on my fingers at dawn or the way his trust is starting to feel like a blade pressed to my own throat.
But I give Kasper the bones of it.
“Viktor wants him dead if the old man doesn’t fold,” I say. “Forty-eight hours. Max. Mikhail’s calling the bluff. Says he’ll have other kids, that he doesn’t care what we do with the boy.”
Kasper doesn’t blink.
“And you?”
I look at my hands. A scar from that night all those years ago still runs along the inside of my forearm—a thin white line, a marker of my history in this game.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I say.
Kasper exhales through his nose. Long. Slow.
“This is one problem you gotta resolve for yourself, kid,” Kasper says. “No playbook. No right answer. Just consequences.”
He leans forward and his voice drops.
“But whatever you choose… whether you pull that trigger or you don’t… you live with it. Every morning. Every night. Every time you look in the mirror. That’s the deal. Always has been.”
